


slow emergencies

by capo (gliss)



Category: Free!
Genre: Alternate Universe, Facing the future, Growing Up, M/M, Vignettes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-06
Updated: 2014-12-06
Packaged: 2018-02-28 10:35:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,090
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2729231
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gliss/pseuds/capo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Perhaps you don't need to know someone their entire life to change them.</p><p>[ log for souharuweek ]</p>
            </blockquote>





	slow emergencies

 

 

 **i’m feeling a fault line, moving miles beneath my feet //** future fish (ish)

Sousuke is a dream stealer, Haru decides one evening while he’s watching the thief in question towel off his hair. It sticks out messily in little dark spikes, which makes him want to smooth them down. He’s tried it before - it didn’t work. Not a lot of things work out between them, actually, but cohabitation seems to be doing fine at the very least.

“Quit staring, Nanase,” Sousuke mumbles into the damp towel, which is black (greenish under the bright hallway light) and utterly humorless.

“Wasn’t staring,” Haru says stubbornly. “I was thinking.”

“Huh.” Sousuke half-smirks at him, lazy as he drags a T-shirt over his head and slings the towel around his neck.

Haru rolls his eyes and settles back onto the couch, mindlessly channel surfing until he settles on a holiday cooking program. He watches fish being carefully grilled for a few seconds and then leans into the cushion against the armrest to brood over his latest realization. Sousuke’s a dream stealer, Haru thinks, not because he steals them _from_ people but rather because he steals them for himself and then makes them better.

After some suspicious clattering in the kitchen, Sousuke reappears, two steaming mugs in hand; he sets one on the coffee table and sips at the other, and then jostles around for lounging space on the couch. Haru kicks at him half-heartedly, mostly because he’s still trying to figure out when the role of imparting life wisdom between them flip-flopped.

“Move your goddamn foot,” Sousuke hisses. A bit of his drink - hot cocoa, probably, maybe with stolen cinnamon that Haru’s been keeping behind all the other spices in the cabinet - sloshes over the rim of the mug and onto his hand, and he swears.

Haru shoots him a look. Sousuke appears to be largely unaffected by this look, probably because he uses it himself quite often; it’s a sleepy look of apathy, brushed satiny with disdain. “Aren’t you supposed to be studying for entrance exams?”

“It’s Saturday, give me a break.”

“Yeah, and the exam is a week away,” Haru points out. “You were the one lecturing me about seizing my future and all the other day, weren’t you? Right after you quit your part-time.”

“That’s different,” Sousuke says quickly. “That’s because I want to focus more on the swim team.”

“But you don’t spend any more time at the pool, either.”

“Well.” Sousuke sets down his cocoa and looks smaller, which is something Haru has only seen him do at home. “I need to, uh, rest properly, too, and besides, whenever I got home after work the food was all cold.”

Haru nudges the small of Sousuke’s back with his foot. “Go study. I’ll make dinner.”

 

Haru works the morning shifts at the bakery down the street, so by the time Sousuke wakes up for school he’s usually already settled in behind the counter, fastening the knot of his white (relatively, at least compared to his co-worker’s) apron behind his back.

So when Sousuke wanders into the kitchen to pick up his cooling breakfast on his way to the train station and Haru’s standing there shaking a hot omelette onto a plate, he’s not quite sure what to do.

“Making you a big breakfast for a big day,” Haru tells him dryly to stop the blank gaping, placing a pair of chopsticks onto the plate with a faint click. “Eat.”

“Don’t you have work?”

“I switched shifts with Atsushi.” Atsushi wasn’t too happy about it until the topic of afternoon naps came up in the conversation.

“Oh.” Sousuke takes a bite of the omelette while Haru watches, cautious - nervous, almost. “Thanks. This is good.”

Good luck today, Haru wants to say, but instead he says: “Don’t give up on anything today, Yamazaki.”

Sousuke drinks all his coffee in one go, wipes at his mouth with his hand (Haru pushes a napkin at him, which he ignores), and then eats the rest of his food, which Haru used to comment on just to make him scowl but now accepts as an unwilling part of reality. “Same to you, Nanase.”

Then he collects his plate and the chopsticks and his empty cup of coffee and puts them in the sink, the first time he’s done so of his own accord; Haru has to wonder if this is all happening because Sousuke, like himself, is sensing the little wrench of finality that is today. The last bolt that has to slide into place before the future is pretty much locked in - today. If their positions reversed, would Sousuke do the same?

“One of these days you should let me make breakfast,” Sousuke says almost cheerfully, peering around Haru’s shoulder and finally snatching up the goddamn napkin. “See you, Nanase.”

He grabs his backpack and heads out the door. Haru watches him go and thinks - how long does he have left?

 

By the time Haru realizes he’ll miss Sousuke when he moves out for college, Sousuke is already starting to pack his belongings. There are boxes lined up in his room, which was always neat and minimal but is now positively _lonely_. Haru knows. His own room looked mostly like that until three years ago, when Rin dropped by for a visit to introduce Sousuke and inform him that “You are twenty years old, and the only poster you have in your room is one of a dolphin. That’s _pathetic_ ,” so he’d gone out and bought these weird bird-like wood carvings to string around like fairy lights.

Sousuke graduates from high school without much pomp or circumstance, just the usual ceremony and pictures and walking under the sakura trees around campus. When he comes home he drops the second button of his uniform into Haru’s tea cup, and then tries to deny it when Haru asks.

“Please don’t tell me that button just happened to fall off while you were walking by, hunched over a cup of tea,” Haru says, fishing it out with a pair of chopsticks.

Predictably, Sousuke scowls at him. “Try to appreciate a token of gratitude when you see one, Nanase.”

Haru says nothing and sips at his tea even though it probably has dirt and pollen and whatever the outdoors might have stained the button with in it.

It’s when Sousuke starts emptying out his closet that Haru remembers his thought all those months back - Sousuke is a dream stealer.

Haru’s dream was to shake off his muddled, directionless years of adolescence and figure out what to do with his life by moving to Tokyo, and Sousuke’s is apparently to expedite this process by applying for a study abroad program in Texas, of all places. Haru has a fun time imagining Sousuke there, but he's mostly restless and uneasy at the thought of being left alone again, aimless as he was three years ago. Some pressure is helpful, was all Sousuke said when Haru asked him with as little agitation as he could manage, and besides, even if I didn’t go abroad, I’d probably move out anyway.

“Sendai is closer than _Texas_ ,” was all Haru said. Besides, Sousuke’s plan, whatever it might be, is working; he’s looking at applications to university before going to bed, although he hasn’t told anyone.

 

The flight taking Sousuke to Texas departs at four in the morning, so instead of sending him to bed early like a responsible adult _should_ , Haru decides to pull an all-nighter with him. Nevermind that it’s a Tuesday and he has to show up to work and help decorate cakes and generally use fine motor skills that will be dulled with lack of sleep.

The two of them are slumped together on the couch at two in the morning, after Sousuke checks his checklist five times and takes a shower out of what Haru knows is nerves.

“So,” Haru says, softly, “that’s it, then.”

“Yeah. What’re you gonna do after I leave?”

“I don’t know,” Haru admits.

“Maybe you should go to university too,” Sousuke says, absent and offhand, but the way he’s looking at Haru isn’t. “Anyway, we should get going.”

He stands and so does Haru; he’s taller than Haru now, just - bigger, in a way that he wasn’t three years ago.

“Thank you for taking care of me for three years,” Sousuke says in a stilted, formal sort of voice that reminds Haru of the awkward, scowling fifteen year old Rin dropped off back then and nothing like the eighteen year old with resolutely spiky hair and a perfect half-smirk that he is now.

“Idiot,” Haru chides, “just don’t lose direction again out there.”

“I’m coming back, you know. I might even visit.”

“I might not be around when you do,” Haru says carefully. Sousuke looks surprised for a moment, but then smiles at him, a whole-hearted, genuine smile.

It’s when Sousuke is climbing out of the cab at the airport that Haru cracks.

“Sousuke,” he calls, savoring the smooth slide of his first name, how it issues forth like silk from just behind his teeth, “keep in touch, alright?”

Sousuke manages a salute that looks pretty cool. Haru watches him adjust the strap of his luggage and walk away, through the sliding doors that part for him just as easily and effortlessly as the rest of the world should.

 

 **caught in the slightest wind, everything else unravels //** starting over

Maybe it’s because fate has a twisted sense of humor that Sousuke finds himself walking towards the vending machine for the tenth - hundredth - maybe thousandth, he can’t really fucking remember at this point - time, the taste of spring leaving pollen stickiness under his tongue.

_What do you want, Yamazaki?_

Sousuke grits his teeth. He can see the bone of Nanase’s wrist, tensing along the middle of his arm; he can almost feel how tight those slender fingers curl around the plastic bottle, enough to make a faint cracking sound.

The problem is this: that he’s studied every last detail about Nanase on this day. He’s studied the stretch of his neck when he dips his head forwards, the tightness of his lips, the steel in his gaze, the pinpoint purpose behind his every word. And he still doesn’t know how to make anything different.

_What do you want, Yamazaki?_

The problem is this: that other things fade, fuzzy and vaguely painful, into the background - Nakagawa failing his test for the hundredth time, something that stops becoming funny eventually; Nitori and Rin dragging the Mikoshiba kid off to the swim club, Gou demanding a reluctant smile and an apology for falling out of contact. It’s always Nanase, cool and bright, facing him head on without a speck of fear in his eyes, it’s always Nanase, the smooth ripple in his voice, the sliver of teeth he shows, the question pressing, silent, at his throat: what happened between them?

The problem is this: that Sousuke has to watch it all play out like a bad car accident every fucking day, going to bed tired and waking up even more tired, swimming that goddamn race listlessly, varied results.

_What do you want, Yamazaki?_

Sousuke breathes out.

“To get out,” he whispers, his voice feathering around the edges, so fucking weary.

Nanase turns to him then, and his expression is different this time, knowing, and Sousuke wonders if the same has happened to him, if they’ve studied each other to this point, when the tiniest tensing in Nanase’s jaw is as jarring as a gunshot to him, when the same thing is true in reverse.

“You too, then?” Nanase asks, and he just looks so resigned that Sousuke stands up straighter.

_What do you want, Yamazaki?_

“Yeah.”

Nanase nods, like this explains everything. He tosses the water bottle to Sousuke, an offering. Something. Sousuke twists open the cap and hands it back to him. It’s strange, but he doesn’t need to ask; he’s seen Nanase Haruka every single day for a hundred days. Nanase’s mouth tilts up just a little bit.

“Let’s go. I won’t lose to you today either, Yamazaki.”

Sousuke laughs, feels a hundred days younger. “Keep telling yourself that, Nanase.”

 

 **all we need is a little bit of momentum //** au

Up close, the guy with the guitar on the street corner is more and less terrifying all at once.

Haru slips out some coins from his wallet to drop into his case, because that’s what he’s supposed to do, right, but stops short when the guy just starts staring at him, like he’s some sort of anomaly.

He’s got bright eyes and the cold wind lashes stripes of red across his cheekbones, his voice sounding like it fits right in with the season, clear and brittle. His fingers sweep across the guitar strings like wingbeats, steady and subtle, pink with cold.

“Hey, Nanase,” he says.

Haru knows him.

There’s always a weird feeling that comes with recognizing a teacher outside of class, and fundamentally Haru knows it’s not supposed to be strange - teachers don’t exist solely inside learning facilities, after all, and Yamazaki isn’t even a teacher, he’s just a TA - but it feels like he’s stumbling on a badly kept secret, or like he’s seeing scars meant for someone else’s eyes.

It doesn’t help that Haru hasn’t gone to this particular class - intro biology - more than four times, and he keeps expecting Yamazaki to bring this up, to start asking questions that he doesn’t want or know how to answer.

“What, you don’t recognize me?” Yamazaki looks good in street fashion, looks good in the dark grey beanie on his head and dark wash jeans and shoes that looks like they cost more than his side job as a street musician can afford. He looks better like this than he does in his awkward TA clothes, which looks like they came from a 40-year-old’s closet. A 40-year-old with zero sense of fashion. Haru licks his cracked lips so that they don’t start to bleed before he talks.

“I recognize you,” he says. “I was just surprised.”

Yamazaki shrugs, as if in dismissal, and goes back to his song. Haru catches some of the lyrics, which arch over a series of melancholy sounding chords, talking about something nostalgic. He doesn’t know the song, doesn’t know if it’s something Yamazaki wrote or if it’s something he can pick out on the radio, and he feels too numb to ask. But he doesn’t walk away either, so after the end of the song Yamazaki grudgingly stands up and tells Haru to sit down on the tiny stool he brought with him.

“You want something hot to drink? What are you doing out here, anyway?”

“Just...walking,” Haru shrugs, “I can go, if you need to do this…”

“Nah, I can use the company for a bit. And a break. There, across the street - they sell gyoza for really cheap.” Yamazaki starts to lift his guitar strap over his head.

Sitting in the cramped restaurant with Yamazaki is weird, too; Haru knows that it happens - Kisumi and Rin and Nagisa always tell him stories of eating lunch with their professors - but he doesn’t think it would happen to him, ever. Yamazaki bites into half his gyoza, pauses, and then sticks the other half in his mouth too, which Haru never thought could be categorized as _cute_ but now accepts as a part of reality.

In class Yamazaki is actually kind of scary, Haru thinks, because of the way he looks like he’s sizing everyone up, but now he just looks hungry. Haru takes a small, demure bite of his food. It burns as he swallows, the kind of burn that he always craves after being out in the cold. The two of them exchange smiles like flowers, like they’re just two kids who don’t have anything to worry about - no papers, no anxieties. Perhaps for now, they can be.

Yamazaki doesn’t say anything while they eat, but weirdly enough, it makes Haru talkative.

 

 **touched your skin with velvet gloves and made you feel alive //** touch

The third time they do this Sousuke holds his breath and strokes his thumb over the high jut of Haru’s collar bone after he sucks on it. Haru trembles, feathersoft, at the motion, the hot brush of skin on skin enough to unspool the way he’s held together, like sand underwater, by sheer mystery.

It’s gratifying, but terrifying, how Haru’s eyelids slip shut like tadpoles through fingers, how his eyelashes flutter, how his lips tremble around each sigh, each gasp, any unwilling sound louder than that. Sousuke feels like he’s trying to hold together something formless, like scooping the top layer of the pool up with a spoon, each tiny touch closer to scattering the particles that make up Haruka Nanase into fine gold dust. He doesn’t know what he’s going to find at the core of it all, if there will be apple seeds or nothing at all.

Haru’s ribs feel breakable under his fingers, so he takes extra care to be gentle; he’s ticklish between them, each helpless giggle lifting from him like bubbles. His thighs are soft, a deceptive soft. Slipping his hand between them earns Sousuke an admonishing gasp, moving his palm up an airy sigh. Haru isn’t particularly loud or quiet, just natural, like falling water, going whichever way is the easiest. In this case, he seeps into the mattress, boneless and graceful, beautiful.

Sousuke watches the flush spread like dawn over his skin, encouraging and spellbinding. Like sand, Haru is almost reshapable, like water, soft and strong. Last time he was rougher, and Haru parted with barely a whisper; the first time, he was nervous despite all the stupid things he said, and Haru was accommodating, slowly moulding to him the water does, redefining him in the process. This time he takes it slow, curious to know how it works.

Haru says nothing, but the way he responds, the arch of his spine and the ballooning in his chest, tells Sousuke everything.

 

 **used to dream until i stopped writing fiction //** croquettes

A block down from campus is a reasonably priced little restaurant where Sousuke eats lunch on Tuesdays and Thursdays. It’s noisy, usually, crowded with hungry university students and visitors who determinedly ignore fancier restaurants or are on the go, eager to explore “as much of Tokyo as we can!”

Haruka Nanase also happens to work there, coincidentally during the lunch time rush on Tuesdays and Thursdays as well. Sousuke spends an awful lot of his time staring at Haruka while he eats his lunch, which previously resulted in him missing his mouth with the food. Now he’s grown accustomed to it, and slurps at his noodles with a practiced precision that only many incidences of prolonged dreamy gazing can achieve.

Haruka is a marine biology major, in his year, so it’s weird that they’ve never taken a class together. Sousuke was okay with that mostly because seeing someone like him in lab goggles or staring at a textbook would totally mess with the way he sees him usually, heat-repellant in the cloistering restaurant, never so much as a flush staining his face during the lunch rush. Now he kind of wants to know what Haruka is like in real life, if he’s always edging on this side of cold civility or if he’s just plain weird, if he’s just as endearing as the pineapple pin on his apron.

Haruka generally treats Sousuke with a detached sort of resignation, just the same as he treats anyone else. At first it made him kind of angry - why wouldn’t Haruka acknowledge him? The only person he seemed to like talking to was the shorter blond boy who worked his shift with him, and even then it was more eye rolling and fond glances than actual words. Now Sousuke just takes it with a grain of salt, literally, trying to figure out if making the first move was worth it.

Try asking him for a smile to go with your meal, Rin tells him cheekily over breakfast one cloudy Thursday morning after catching Sousuke staring intensely at his vast and pretty much useless cologne selection.

“That is the _dumbest_ thing I’ve ever heard,” Sousuke swears darkly. “Hey, can I borrow your -”

“Nothing I have fits you, Sousuke,” Rin says patiently.

“Right. Um.”

Usually banter isn’t a problem, especially with Rin, but Sousuke’s general state of “right, um” follows him throughout his morning chemistry lab - shit, he probably smells like chem lab now, instead of the cologne - and into the restaurant.

Haruka isn’t there, so Sousuke gives his order to the other guy - korokke soba, please - and drops his backpack into a seat near the window so he can look out into the street while eating.

Actually, Haruka doesn’t show up until he’s nearly done with his lunch, walking through the door like a glowing thing in his white hoodie and pale skin and dark, soft-looking hair. The blond boy giggles and pulls him in to whisper something excitedly at him, and then both of them turn to look at Sousuke.

“Here’s your bill,” Haruka informs him after a few moments of staring.

Sousuke takes it, glances down at it, and realizes that he’s been charged half the amount he should have been. “Uh, you m -”

Haruka’s eyes flicker over his face and he falls silent. Okay. Sousuke hastily scribbles his signature across the bottom, along with his cell number, and then, before anyone can look at the receipt, presses that and his money into Haruka’s hand and flees.

It’s around dinner time that his phone goes off.

_Acknowledge me properly, why don’t you? <*)))<_

 

 **shall we get intimate again? i think so, i think so //** kiss

The boy in the water is one that Sousuke sees, sometimes, when the pool nears closing hours, when the lights string like rows of lanterns under the water and the sky curtains itself in a blush. He has the kind of skin that doesn’t seem to get any darker even though he spends most of his time out under the sun, in the water; when sunset comes his entire body seems to reflect the sky, rosy and magical.

Sousuke watches him swim when there isn’t anyone else in the pool, even though he usually has a book with him. He’s the kind of person who seems to melt into the water and reappear at the other end of the lane, smooth as glass, barely a ripple following him as he moves. Like a shadow, maybe, or a light.

He’s here later than usual today - usually his friend comes by half an hour before closing to pick him  up, citing something about siblings and dinner and homework. There’s no one else here, so Sousuke puts down his book and watches him, at the way he flows through the water like it isn’t anything he needs to push through. He must look pretty into it, leaning forward in his seat until he almost tips off the edge.

“You wanna swim?” the boy calls up, floating on his back in the middle of the pool. Sousuke considers this for a moment.

“Yeah, why not,” he decides, climbing down from the high seat, “where’s your friend?”

“Went on vacation with his family,” the boy answers.

“I see.”

Sousuke drags his T-shirt up over his head and steps into the pool; he hasn’t had to go in all day, and the water is colder now that the sun’s going down. He shivers for a moment.

“Yamazaki, right?” the boy asks, his blue eyes drifting shut.

“Sousuke, actually,” Sousuke says, intrigued; he takes a moment to duck his head under the water, and when he comes up again the boy is still drifting calmly, like the pool is as good as the entire world for him. “What’s your name?”

“Haruka.” Distant. It suits him, Sousuke supposes, in the way he seems to be removed from the business that generally comes with being alive in this day and age. Haruka, cracks open an eye to look at him, lazy under the darkening sky, and the water that ripples against his body lights up like fairy dust. Sousuke wants to reach out and touch him to see if his body is made of something else - clouds, maybe.

He must have stared for a while, because Haruka opens his eyes fully to ask him if he’s going to swim or just stand there, and Sousuke recovers enough to shrug. He could swim, he thinks, or he can just watch Haruka swim, and figure out how he does it, how he almost dissolves.

“I can race you,” Haruka suggests, kicking his feet lazily and starting to move towards one end of the pool.

“Didn’t know you were into racing,” Sousuke mumbles, although he shouldn’t be surprised; he’s seen the guy do five, six laps easily without slowing down at all.

“I’m not. But I’m curious.”

“All right, then,” Sousuke agrees.

They do a lap and Haruka wins; they do another one and Sousuke swears up and down that it’s a tie; they do a third lap and Haruka flips over onto his back again and calmly tells Sousuke that he’s pretty good, maybe they can swim together sometime in a few days. He isn’t even tired, while Sousuke’s chest is heaving a little, so it should be fine, then, if Sousuke puts his hands along the length of Haruka’s spine and leans down to kiss him on the mouth.

“Why’d you do that?” Haruka asks when they break apart, his voice faint.

“Felt like it, I guess,” Sousuke shrugs. “Wanted to see you out of breath.”

Haruka doesn’t say anything for a few minutes, but continues to float. Sousuke looks up and realizes that he can see the stars now, scattered into pieces of constellations - but just pieces, like the rest of them have all gathered in the water, in the little bubbles that burst up onto the surface.

Then he stands up - he’s a few centimeters shorter than Sousuke, but not too short that lacing cold fingers up against the back of Sousuke’s neck and pulling him down to kiss him, hard, pushing their bodies together enough that when Sousuke’s heart pounds painfully against his ribcage he’s sure Haruka can feel it too.

“There,” Haruka whispers against his jaw, shaky, “happy?”

Like this Haruka is a solid thing, a human being with blood rushing through his veins, warm-blooded underneath water cooled skin.

“Come over,” Sousuke says, when Haruka’s hands slide down to his shoulders.

“Alright.”

“I’ll make you dinner. You shouldn’t swim all day and not eat.”

“Alright.”

Sousuke feels himself smiling like an idiot, but he can’t bring himself to stop. “Let’s go.”

“Ten minutes til closing,” Haruka remarks, staring at the sky like he can tell what time it is just from that. Maybe he can. Maybe there’s a bit of star matter in him anyway. Or, maybe, the soft lights in the water are really fairies.

 

 **there’s a slow emergency //** i can hear the bell in the dark

It starts when Haru catches a glimpse of the tattered blazer and the cigarette smoke and the brooding stare on his way to school. The figure blocks out on the sand like a solid shadow, curling towards the open sky. Makoto pulls him towards the center of the sidewalk so that he doesn’t step off into the sand and get it in his shoes, and Haru turns away to focus on the road ahead of him.

In class he sits next to Rin and in front of Makoto in the back left corner of the room; the three of them curve like a misplaced Tetris piece around an empty seat.

Rin looks like shit, but he usually does these days - most people do when they’re pale, half-toned technicolor versions of what they should be. He has half-chipped off black polish on his nails, shadows under his eyes and a distant sort of blankness in them, like he has to be physically tugged back into conversation. Some days are worse than others, days when he snaps at the teacher when he’s called on to read in class, days when he says alarming things like _I could just run right off this roof and you can’t stop me_ , even though he knows it’s a lie. Haru is afraid of those days, afraid that he’ll be too slow to seize Rin around the waist, drag him backwards into the safety of Makoto’s arms where he can hold out against his storm.

Some days it’s not so bad, so Rin might come into class with a faint, faint smile on his face, and laugh and make jokes and let Haru tease him during lunch. Some days Rin likes to be touched, leaning comfortably against Haru’s shoulder, in the crook of his neck like a sleepy cat, lets Makoto’s strong hands run down his back. Sometimes he’ll tell them - _I went swimming yesterday, and it was alright_ , or he’ll tell them - _that hyperactive life guard is still chasing after my fucking cleavage of all things_ , and when Haru snorts, he doesn’t get offended.

Some days it starts out alright, and then gets worse, like today; the teacher’s gaze shifts towards them, her eyebrows furrowing in concern, and she asks the question no one wants to answer: where’s Yamazaki-kun?

“Out,” Rin growls. Haru’s stomach twists at the scratch in his voice, long and red and raw.

“I saw him earlier,” he hears himself saying, ignoring the way Makoto starts audibly in his seat, “he was on the beach.”

“Ah,” says Amakata-sensei, “well, would you be able to bring him some papers after school?”

“Yeah,” says Haru. Rin glares at him.

“Great! Thank you so much, Nanase-kun - now, please turn to page thirty-two, we’ll be studying the passage about the full moon today, and how it parallels the fickleness of …”

Haru fazes out of the lesson and spends the hour staring out the window, looking past the fine sunlit edges of Rin’s red hair towards where the ocean must be.

 

He catches Sousuke on the beach after school while Rin and Makoto walk towards Rin’s therapist’s office. Rin makes Makoto go with him, because if he doesn’t he’ll just take the wrong turn and end up bumming cigarettes off of some guy he meets on the streets. It took them a while to realize what was happening, and even though the resulting conversation ended with Rin screaming that he’ll never talk to them again, if only they would stop _fucking meddling_ , he still dragged Makoto with him. And even though the part of town they walk through is terrifying, a little, Makoto goes.

At least, Haru thinks, Rin is stubbornly getting better. Sousuke’s sitting on the beach, bare hands burning against the sand, gazing up at the sky in a way that suggests he’d rather be up there, watching down on them.

It’s the first time Haru’s seen him in almost a month, and in that month all of the edges of Sousuke’s face have gotten sharper instead of stronger, his eyes fever-bright and painful when they meet Haru’s own.

“I brought some assignments from school,” Haru says instead of greeting him.

“Keep them, I’m not gonna do them.”

“If you come to class they’d be easy to do.”

“I’m not fucking going to class, Nanase,” Sousuke snaps, his voice edged out from smoke.

“Rin wants you to come to class.” But it’s the wrong thing to say; Sousuke - whose hand had, despite his words, been reaching towards the stapled packet in Haru’s - snatches his hand back and resolutely reaches for another cigarette.

“Fuck Rin too.”

“He misses you,” Haru frowns. “We all -”

“You can all forget about me,” Sousuke interrupts. “I’m not going back to school.”

“You’re not suspended anymore, though. You can go back and graduate with the rest of us.”

“Yeah, what the fuck am I gonna do in school? Sell out what’s left of my life? Get lost, Haru.”

“Rin’s been keeping up with therapy,” Haru says, desperate, sharp; he doesn’t know how to help, really, but he also knows that Sousuke only reacts visibly when Rin’s name is mentioned. Quietly he thinks that Makoto would be doing a better job than he, but Makoto’s not here; Makoto’s trying to help Rin get his life back in order, to bring Rin back closer to what he used to be, a star-chasing boy with a cherry red smile. “He hasn’t smoked for - weeks, months, two months and five days.”

Sousuke flinches.

“Amakata-sensei is good, you know,” Haru tells him. “She’s not… she doesn’t chase after you when you say you need to be by yourself, and she isn’t afraid to stand up for students.”

“Great,” Sousuke says. “Great. So what? It’s too late for me anyway, I haven’t gone to school enough days to graduate, anyway. I can’t trust any of them to help me, and I sure as hell can’t do it all by myself.”

“But we can help.”

“No. You can barely handle Rin, and he’s - worth more than I am, anyway.” Sousuke lights up. It’s illegal to smoke on the beach, but Haru doesn’t fight him on that. “So just forget about me, okay? Have a good life, and all.”

“Don’t talk like you’re leaving this place.”

“I am leaving this place. Aren’t you the one who always went on and on about being free? I’m going.”

“You’re not going to be free if you don’t,” Haru pauses, lost for words, “fuck, Sousuke. Don’t leave yet.”

“Convince me, then.”

Sousuke says it like it’s offhanded, casual; he sounds almost like he did a year ago, when it was the four of them crouched around a bonfire singing mostly off-key to stupid pop songs and vowing to make the best of their three years of high school and holding hands like the dumb, incredibly naive teenagers they were. But he doesn’t take his eyes off Haru’s face, and for a moment, Haru can read him as well as Makoto can read the rest of them.

The storm that caught Rin’s father, that liked him so much that it claimed him for itself, is still hooked up in Sousuke’s eyes; the bruises on his face when Rin tried to move on and Sousuke didn’t and they fought about it still stings; the tears that Kou cried when he shoved her away still track, obvious to a skilled hunter, down his cheeks. Haru remembers when he and Rin started to get in trouble, and at first no one faulted them for it when they showed up with black eyes.

The worst was his mouth, the chapped red of his lips, bitten to bleeding when he was caught the first time moaning half-naked against the brick wall of an alleyway, his back rubbed raw while another boy stroked between his legs. The worst was the dark ring of hickeys on his neck, defiantly stark on his skin, when he came to school the next morning and was punched out by some asshole for being a _total fag_. The worst was the ashen look on his face at the end of year assembly six months ago, the way he and Rin didn’t look at each other. The worst is the way he and Rin still don’t look at each other, even though they live in the same house, trapping Kou and Rin’s mother into the most fucking awkward situation.

No, Haru thinks, the worst is the way he and Makoto look at Sousuke like he’s something terrifying and foreign. Maybe Sousuke sees it, too; maybe that’s why Sousuke is like this.

“Come home with me,” he says, quietly. “Please.”

 

Sousuke looks out of place, dark, in Haru’s living room where the light floods in through the large windows. He seems to catch fire in all the wrong places, and something about it makes Haru want to draw. But he doesn’t; he pours Sousuke a glass of water and sits him down on his couch, despite all the sand.

Sousuke runs a hand through his hair, looks lost and uncomfortable and defiant. Now that he’s gotten this far, Haru doesn’t know what to do, either; all he knows is that he can’t let Sousuke leave - that if he does, he’ll probably never hear from him again, and it’s not fair to Makoto, or Rin, or himself.

But he doesn’t know what to _do_.

“It’s nice,” Sousuke says after an age of silence. “Your house. Hasn’t changed much.”

“Thanks.”

“So, then,” Sousuke leans back into the couch, reflexive, and the motion makes Haru’s heart twist, his chest tighten. It feels like finding an old CD he used to listen to, except seeing it bent in half, or maybe coming upon an overgrown garden he used to visit as a child, a dried up well that he used to make wishes on. “Why are we here?”

Haru remembers something Rin said to him, the first time they talked about his therapy sessions - _she just told me that if I have nothing to say, start with my morning. It kind of works._

“I saw you this morning,” he tells Sousuke softly. “While I was going to school.”

Sousuke’s lip curls, but it’s not a pleasant sight. “I know. I saw you. And Makoto.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t say anything,” Haru tries; he tries to put meaning into his words but they come out choked and half-hearted, faint, weak.

“Whatever, Haru. If you’re dragging me here to apologize, don’t bother. It’s fine.”

“No - I -” Haru’s mouth works for a moment. “Why do you want to go?”

If Sousuke’s startled by the question, he doesn’t show it. “To get rid of all this.”

“All this?”

“All this _shit_ I have to deal with.” Color comes into Sousuke’s voice for the first time, like he can’t quite forget how to be friends with Haru, “All of _you_.”

“But that’s not how it works,” Haru says, “that’s not - you can’t get rid of us. Like that. And fuck if we’re not going to go after you. Rin and Makoto are worried all the fucking time, Rin says you don’t go home until way after midnight and you’re out the door before he even gets up, and you don’t talk to Kou or -”

“ _Don’t_ ,” Sousuke snarls, “ _don’t_ you fucking drag Kou into this.”

“She’s your sister, and you won’t even talk to her.”

“Because I’m _fucked up, Haru_. I’m a mess and I don’t need her to worry about me or try to - to make me better, or whatever, she has Rin, and she has the rest of you, and besides,” Sousuke takes a deep breath, like he’s trying to calm himself, except his next words feel like a punch in the throat, “I’m a dirty cocksucker, so it’s not like I have anything respectable waiting for me in this goddamn place anyway.”

Sousuke stares at Haru for a moment longer before his eyes drop towards his lap instead, so fast that Haru can actually sense the burning there.

“And you don’t have to lie to me, I know Rin’s easier to get along with,” he mutters, his voice shattered.

Haru doesn’t move. He doesn’t; he’s sitting stock fucking still for one moment, and the next he’s pushing Sousuke further back, cradling the back of his head with one hand, feeling the ache in his knuckles when they collide with the wall. One moment he’s an entire world away, a lifestyle away; the next moment he’s licking into Sousuke’s slack mouth, tasting the sharp sweetness of nicotine, the bitterness, the ash.

When he pulls away he feels sick to his stomach and the look in Sousuke’s eyes is blank.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers, “I’m so sorry -”

“What the _fuck,_ you asshole,” Sousuke shouts, shoving him off his lap, “ _what the fuck?_ ”

“I’m sorry.”

“You fucking try that shit with me again and I’ll -”

Sousuke’s got him shoved against the wall now, his fist inches away from Haru’s face, and just like that, he shuts down. Haru’s heartbeat seems to reverberate through his entire body; his chest is pounding, his throat - his _brain_ is pounding, but for once it’s not out of fear. His chest hurts so much that he feels sick with sadness, but he doesn’t stop looking at Sousuke, who deserves this much, at least.

“Fuck,” Sousuke says - chokes out, more like - “fuck. I need to go. I need to go - I’m sorry.”

“Don’t.”

Haru feels Sousuke shake, his body straining for God knows what reason, guilt and shame curling him inwards on himself. “I swore,” he says, “I _swore_ to myself I would never hit you or Makoto and I - this is so fucked.”

“You didn’t hit me,” Haru says, “you didn’t.”

“I was going to. I can’t - I just.” Sousuke pauses, breathing hard, his eyes red-rimmed and angry, “you’re so fucking perfect, Haru - you know that? You’re so perfect and I’m the lowest fucking scum and I can’t even tell myself that I miss my friends, that’s how low I am, and I can’t let you get dragged down like this.” He lets go of Haru, backs away numb and helpless.

Haru wants to kiss him again, but he feels worse for the thought, so instead settles for a weak, “I’m not perfect.”

“You’re perfect to me. You and Makoto. Even Rin, I - you’re all better people than I am.” Sousuke drags a hand over his face. “So it’s fine. One of us was bound to fuck up his life before anything, anyway.”

“There’s no such thing as perfect. None of us are - and none of us are better people than you.” Even speaking the words feels fake, but Haru shakes his head, “we’re not going to let you drag us down, but we _are_ going to pull you back up. It’s what we do. You’re kind of stuck like this.”

“Not if I go away,” Sousuke says, but it’s uncertain now, cracked, a broken seashell’s murmur. And Haru finally gets a sense of what he needs to do, what Sousuke might have needed to hear, all this time.

“I don’t want you to go,” Haru tells him. It’s the first real honest thing he’s said all day, and it feels something like relief, dizzying and incredible. More than that, it feels necessary. “I would miss you - we would all miss you. I… I know I can’t stop you from going if that’s what you really want, but we can work things out. Together. Remember what Rin said - back in middle school, when we all did that relay? That we don’t have to do anything alone.”

There's more, but he doesn't know how to finish. Rin always understood Sousuke better than the rest of them, so Haru just lets it hang there, catching his hopes like gossamer.

“You,” and then the corner of Sousuke’s mouth twitches slightly, “you fucking _suck_ at convincing people.”

“I - yeah. I do.” Another rush of relief, more powerful than the last one. Haru thinks this might be a dream. “I’m terrible at this. I shouldn’t be allowed to give people talks, since I’ll just kiss them.”

“Not too great at that, either,” Sousuke says, but then the almost-smile disappears. “Why? You’re not into me like that - you’re not even into _men_ \- and I’m not going to do that kind of thing with you, if that’s what you think will help.”

Haru shakes his head again. “I couldn’t not do it. It’s… I don’t know. I wanted to. I’m sorry.”

“You’re right. You shouldn’t be allowed to talk.” Sousuke takes a breath again, stares at the mostly empty wall. “I bet Makoto and Rin can do it better.”

“You mean -?”

“Maybe… maybe not Makoto, not just yet. But I… I owe Rin a lot of… I need to tell him some things. I need to apologize. And thank him. And tell him I’m proud of -” Sousuke’s voice catches, cracks.

Haru picks up his phone with a smile.

 

In a roundabout way, Haru kind of gets it. Gets how easily, almost, it was.

They talk until their throats are dry, and Haru pours more water for them both, and they talk more, until words turn shy, until the nervous smiles turn fond, soft.

 _I just needed to hear it, I guess_ , Sousuke told him, _I didn’t think about anything else really_.

He’s playing with Haru’s fingers, curling and uncurling them, tapping them gently against his wrist while he talks, and it’s so much like how he used to be, with the little physical gestures, not grand and executed like how Rin was, not quite as subtle as how Makoto was. It makes Haru wonder if he felt the same back then, at the quiet, undercurrent intimacy, if anyone else noticed it.

Haru realizes he’s studying Sousuke’s face, how it looks softer, warmer despite the fatigue.

Sousuke leans in to touch their lips together, tentative. Shy.

“Is this okay?” Haru has to ask.

“I’m asking you,” Sousuke replies.

So when Rin opens the door and walks into the living room he sees Haru and Sousuke tangled together on the couch, quiet, drifting asleep, and no one else hears the soft “thank fucking god” that escapes his lips.

 

Sousuke walks into the classroom with Rin the next day looking like he expects to be slapped in the face. Instead, Amakata-sensei greets him with a kind, surprised smile. The first thing he does is go up to Makoto and apologize, and the class gets to watch as Makoto Tachibana pulls the class delinquent into his arms, the warmest smile pressed into his shoulder.

The four of them eat lunch out on the roof, napkins tucked under water bottles so they don’t fly away in the breeze. Kou finds them like that, halfway into their food.

“You’re _so fucking dead, Sousuke Yamazaki_ ,” she yells, upsetting Rin’s bento box in the process, “You _suck_ and you owe me so many apologies, and the hug I never got, and also dinner, and another apology after that.”

“I’m sorry,” Sousuke says, looking slightly frightened, and then Kou leaps on him and everything dissolves into crying and laughing and Sousuke, panicked, trying to explain himself and praise her and not spill his food at the same time. Haru watches everything and feels -

At home.

 

It’s an uphill battle, if he has to admit. It’s not easy dealing with Rin in the middle of both therapy and rehab, and it’s not easy dealing with Sousuke’s sudden mood swings, the way he can joke around one moment, making Rin flustered, and the next sink back into himself, pushing away offers to help. It’s not easy dealing with his own lack of ability to really do anything except listen, or the way Makoto bites his lip and looks uncertain when the same uncertainty hurts at the rest of them more than anything else.

It’s strange, sometimes, imagining Sousuke the way he was, and seeing him as he is, an awkward boy still filling out his shoulders penciling in integrals and balancing chemical equations and pointing out literary themes. Sousuke gets a part-time job at the library of all places, drops his cigarettes into the trash (to Rin’s great amazement), tries his best to comb his hair flat instead of letting it spike up.

It’s strange, sometimes, remembering that a few weeks after he kissed Haru, he and Rin went out in the dead of winter to get Rin a pair of glasses, and now Rin sometimes wears them in class, when he’s tired of squinting against the glare on the blackboard.

It’s strange, sometimes - but nice - to watch him eat his lunch, at the careful way he chews his food, how neatly he eats.

On their last day of winter break the four of them go up to the temple to pray. Makoto leads the way with a thermos in his hand and Haru brings up the rear as they climb up the stone steps. Sousuke and Rin are arguing about something petty, watches or shoes or something, and they bound up the ice-covered staircase with a confidence that neither of them had three months ago.

Haru closes his eyes when the bells begin to ring, and when he opens them again to look at his friends, fresh snowflakes drift against his eyelashes, and four clouds of pure, bright white bloom like flowers as they breathe.

 

 


End file.
